We covered opposition, in-general, to group homes in Aspen Hill, Maryland; later, we opposition to "scattered site housing" for persons with psychiatric disabilities.
We covered, minimally, an abortive effort to close down one such group home. We covered some background on psychiatric disability and "moral incapacity", and we covered the mysterious phenomenon of people with no known official background pretending to be officials and giving newcomers the "welcome wagon walking-tour of weirdos and wackos" in Aspen Hill. We cover PROFIT as a motive for clandestinely organizing neighbors to the cause of evicting these group homes and their residents.
We also covered the basic elements of where to recruit henchmen and minions, and we covered the strategic and tactical niceties of destroying these group homes and their residents so as to acquire the properties on the cheap to turn them into worker-barracks and flophouses for illegal alien workers, and explored the causes and effects of the housing bubble and consequent crash of the economy.
We laid out a start-to-finish trajectory that starts with a search for higher property values, and then goes outside the bounds of decency -- not to mention outside of a huge variety of law -- sparing no amount of wicked cleverness and despicable sneaking-about in the pursuit of raw greed. The story ends in a place we all know: Aspen Hill, Maryland, with one of the highest foreclosure rates in the State of Maryland.
Well it's a year later, and the economy certainly hasn't gotten any better, however much Bonus Money the Wall Street Fat Cats have decided to pay each other. Nationally, unemployment is up around 10 percent, although if you add in the long-term unemployed and the undremployed, it comes closer to 20 percent. While this isn't quite as bad as the over-30-percent unemployment of the Great Depression, the Great Recession comes within spitting distance, so to speak.
So, the pressure's on, and whatever level of antipathy for the disadvantaged might previously have been demonstrated by any shopkeepers in the Aspen Hill area, now that antipathy is doubled, it would seem.
Today I had an experience that I would consider totally worthy of calling in to the police, if I didn't think that they were a very large part of it.
Now, I do not for one minute wish anyone to get the idea that I think it's official police policy to encourage shopkeepers to assault their patrons, whether or not the patrons are everything a shopkeeper could want in their clientele.
I will go on record to say that I am absolutely convinced that at least some officers are extremely inclined to look the other way when crimes of violence -- subtle violence, but violence nonetheless -- are perpetrated against people who shopkeepers decide they don't like.
I would further go on record to say that I am absolutely convinced that the so-called "community policing program as originally conceived has been perverted out of all semblance to "law enforcement" here in Montgomery County.
Here's how it is supposed to work: LE elements ("law-enforcement officers and non-sworn staff") identify stakeholders such as property-managers (commercial or residential facility), school administrators, security firm representatives, and community activists and have recurrent meetings in which police provide statistics and some information into ongoing crime trends, resolution of previous crimes, etc.
It is not supposed to be the case that officers take money off-the-record and outside of public and agency review to provide "security advice" and/or strongarm tactics outside of legal bounds. Yet that's what happens... either that, or there are large "security" operations going on her in Montgomery that rival the scale and scope of the Montgomery County Department of Police, of which the police department is either completely unaware, or entirely and illegally tolerant.
You could call it a militia, and frankly I don't have a problem with that, so long as its not conducting illegal operations such as rousting disabled, disadvantaged, or unpopular persons "just because we can".
You could also call it cause stalking.
I also spoke with police officers from across the country. They confirmed the existence of stalking groups across the country. In general, they said that 'cause stalking' is primarily a civil problem where the plaintiff has to prove financial loss. They also said that there are free speech and grass roots issues involved. In fact, the police themselves are targets of these groups. In small towns, the number of members in these groups can easily exceed the number of police officers. In general, the police will NOT talk about stalking groups. One officer did say there is a storm brewing as groups become larger and more numerous.
[ ... ]
One day, several years ago, I was sitting in my house, and checking out the activity on my scanner. I heard a woman say that she was following a certain vehicle. She gave the location, the make and model of the car and the license plate number. A few days later, I heard the same woman on the same frequency say that she needed a bit of help at a certain location and a few days after that I again heard her broadcasting the position and details about another vehicle she was following. I listened to other people talking on that frequency and they didn't give any indication that they were with any government agency but they were talking about ARRESTING PEOPLE.
[ ... ]
"On another occasion, on the same business band frequency, I heard someone complain that an African American man was crossing the street. "All we could get him for is jaywalking" responded the leader.
[ ... ]
People in the group would discuss where they would go for supper, after their shift was over, so I [the author] went too. I listened to a group of people openly discussing various activities as if they were the police.
"Real police officers were also sitting in the restaurant, listening to them. I later learned that their presence was not a coincidence.
"One man who had supper with the group drove a van marked with the call letters of a local AM radio station. I started listening to it. Most of the guests were people who said they had new revelations about Waco or Ruby Ridge, or had some inside story about government corruption. I also heard advertisements for the meetings of a local political group and I attended some.
"At the first meeting I attended, one young man flashed a phony police badge at me. No one paid any attention. Some of those in attendance were the people I had seen in the local restaurant. This was my introduction to the creepy world of extremists.
[ ... ] (Terrorist (Organized) Stalking in America, Lawson, David, ISBN: 0-9703092-0-1, (2001))
Whatever you want to call it, locally it seems that there are people who make it their business to organize group harassment campaigns of an individual or of individuals. It is vital to the public safety that the police identify the persons responsible and give them a taste of their own medicine.
Some of this might be actually well-intended and a reasoned response to an actual threat, but erroneously misdirected initially as a case of mistaken identity.
For example: in a nearby neighborhood, there is an individual who scams people with a story about having run out of gas and needing to get to the hospital, etc. Usually he's working the gas stations in the vicinity of Glenmont, Maryland, but he isn't above going into the neighborhoods and knocking on doors. He's potentially a danger should he decide to actually enter the houses. Police are well aware of this individual, as are many of the local shopkeepers and the civic association's membership.
Yet if you were to get together a bunch of people to go put an ass-whupping on this individual, based purely on the description, there is an excellent chance that you would get into exceptionally foul trouble for assaulting a police officer named Bruce Beardsley.
Ofc Beardsley is a fine officer, and a patriot who has served his country with military service overseas in a hot warzone. He was, for some time, a liason officer to our little 'mid-county neighborhood initiative' community-policing group in Aspen Hill and Layhill. I can recognize him almost instantly on sight... yet when I was approached by the scammer, it took me more than a few seconds to realize that the person approaching me was not Ofc Beardsley, but a person I knew not at all who had a more than superficial resemblance to that estimable police officer.
To make matters worse, the man was dressed like a plainclothes officer on street detail. From the shoes to the windbreaker and the in-style-2-years-ago collar on the shirt, this man looked like someone they'd call "sergeant" in the non-public area of the police station... but in fact he's a well-known scammer in the Glenmont community. He's not the upstanding public servant to whom he cultivates a resemblance, right down to the same clothing choices and facial expressions.
The moral of this story is "don't go beat someone's ass because their description matches that of a criminal, or a lot of cops may come and knock your goddamn teeth down your goddamn throat".
This section, above, is absolutely true in all detail.
Here's a little story that will demonstrate another approach to getting someone else to kick someone's ass for you.
A guy is ducking his ex-wife's lawyer and anyone looking to serve papers on him. He likes to drink, so he goes to a bar in a really sketchy part of town. Now, this guy is not racist, so it doesn't bother him that he's about the only non-black patron in the bar. He's far from the only white patron, but he's definitely in the minority. What the heck, the drinks are inexpensive.
So, he's sitting there drinking sort of heavily, watching the game, cheering on his team. Finally, the game's over and people go back to drinking and talking.
Another guy comes into the bar, sits down and has a drink, and then turns to the other guy, and says, "let me buy you a drink". The one guy says, "sure, why not". He's drinking when the newcomer says "I want to buy a round for the folks in this room". He pays the bartender, and when everyone has a drink in front of them, he gets up to make a toast, and says "I want you all to drink to the health of this man! Now bottoms up! Bartender, set up another round."
The first guy can't figure this out, but he's not complaining, neither is anyone else. The newcomer stands up and says, "this man here is the best man on earth, he's a man who would do anything for anybody, he's a fine man, a decent man, this man is my best friend! Drink up, and bartender, send another round!"
The man is handing fifty dollar bills to the bartender and the bartender is passing out booze, and the newcomer keeps up his spiel about what a great friend the one guy is. Since the newcomer is passing out drink after drink to the house, they all gather around to listen close.
And the one guy finally get too curious about what was going on here. He asks the guy to tell him why he's got such a high opinion of him.
Everyone else wants to hear it, too. So the newcomer says: "I was down on my luck, I was feeling so down, lost my wife, my son knocked up the town tramp, my boss cut our wages and hours, but this man kept up my spirits, he talked me through it, he's the best friend I ever had..." and everyone's nodding along "... and just when I thought my life was gone to crap, he gave me a dog, a wonderful dog, and now that dog is my other best friend, and if this friend here hadn't given me that dog I don't know what would have happened, but he's my best friend and he gave me a dog, a BLACK dog, and I took that BLACK DOG and named it N****R," and then the man stops talking and runs out the door.
The first guy is just sitting there with his mouth wide open when someone in the crowd -- which you will remember has just been drinking fast and heavy -- says: "so you're his best friend, hmm?"
Right about the time his broken bones healed and had almost stopped hurting, the first guy finds out that the other guy was a private detective hired by his ex-wife's attorney.
The difference between the matter of a police officer and a notorious scammer both frequenting the same neighborhood, and a man pulling a rather severe practical joke on a man he was hired to target, is that in the first case the confusion is the fault of the witness who has heard a description or seen an "artists composite drawing" which very much resembles both a cop and a criminal. In the second case, it's an intentional misrepresentation of actions to a known identity.
What would happen if you intentionally combined both stories? For example, someone could get into the same circles that the scammer frequents when he's spending his ill-gotten gains. They could tell people in that circle that the scammer exactly fits the description of an undercover officer who brought down some friends, "call 'em up and ask 'em for a description if you don't believe me".
So, what happens to me if I walk into a store next to one where there was a recent incident involving someone answers my description no less than their own?
If the shopkeeper in the one store has gotten a description from the store next door, and the description fits me as well as it fits the actual perpetrator, I could get in big trouble for something someone else did...
And as often as something fairly close to this happens to me, I'm fairly sure that someone around here who looks a lot like me -- and may even be cultivating the resemblance by dressing much the same as I do -- has been outraging a lot of folks in the local shopkeeping community.
It's definitely going to be a problem if they mistake me for their perpetrator, and take my own actual photograph and pass it around, attached to the legend of the perpetrator's bad actions.
It's time to get to the bottom of this.
Ideally before they start passing around a picture of a police officer, with the scamming and annoyance of a lookalike misattributed to that picture.
Because that's what "cause stalkers" do: they take the law into their own hands like they thought they were cops.
Perhaps they should be disabused of that notion.
More to come?
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